'The doubts are traitors. Send them to execution!' He shook his head.

'Do you remember that sentence we came across yesterday in Chateaubriand's
letters "As to my career--I have gone from shipwreck to shipwreck." What if
I am merely bound on the same charming voyage?'

'I accept the comparison,' she said with vivacity. 'End as he did in
re-creating a church, and regenerating a literature--and see who will count
the shipwrecks!'

Her hand's disdainful gesture completed the sally.

Manisty's face dismissed its shadow.

As she stood beside him, in the rosy light--so proudly confident--Eleanor
Burgoyne was very delightful to see and hear. Manisty, one of the subtlest
and most fastidious of observers, was abundantly conscious of it. Yet she
was not beautiful, except in the judgment of a few exceptional people, to
whom a certain kind of grace--very rare, and very complex in origin--is of
more importance than other things. The eyes were, indeed, beautiful; so was
the forehead, and the hair of a soft ashy brown folded and piled round it
in a most skilful simplicity. But the rest of the face was too long; and
its pallor, the singularly dark circles round the eyes, the great thinness
of the temples and cheeks, together with the emaciation of the whole
delicate frame, made a rather painful impression on a stranger. It was
a face of experience, a face of grief; timid, yet with many strange
capacities and suggestions both of vehemence and pride. It could still
tremble into youth and delight. But in general it held the world aloof.
Mrs. Burgoyne was not very far from thirty, and either physical weakness,
or the presence of some enemy within more destructive still, had emphasised